


an inheritance of dust

by dathomir



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Friends, F/M, Friends to Enemies to Lovers, Kylo Ren Redemption, Multiple Pairings, Not Canon Compliant - Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Slow Burn, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:23:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21990418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dathomir/pseuds/dathomir
Summary: KYLO REN is missing! Following the destruction of Starkiller Base, the Supreme leader finds himself without an APPRENTICE. Far-flung rumor claims that he was picked up by THE RESISTANCE after losing a lightsaber duel with the scavenger, REY. Now, Snoke is willing to stop at nothing to return his missing apprentice to THE FIRST ORDER, but General LEIA ORGANA has other plans.Meanwhile, in the ILEENIUM SYSTEM, former secretary of the Hapan senator and childhood friend of Ben Solo, KATLIND CARWAI is faced with a man who is almost a stranger to her… and one who is determined to flee the Resistance base on D’QAR in order to return to his rightful place as Master of the Knights of Ren.With the help of Rey, Finn, and Poe, will the four of them manage to reach KYLO REN? Or will he return to Supreme Leader SNOKE before they can make a difference?
Relationships: Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Original Female Character(s), Finn/Rey (Star Wars), Kylo Ren/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 14





	an inheritance of dust

Rey exhaled.

Every breath she took tasted of recycled air, of sweat and blood, but she forced herself to breathe despite the tang in her mouth. Her shoulders ached with every slow pump of her lungs, a stretch of her back tender to the rise and fall of her chest. Thrown, with the Force. Saved, by the Force, just before she crashed down into the snow. At least, she was under the impression that she’d saved herself at the last moment.

A frustrated pair of wrinkles formed between her brows. Aside from the constant hum of the Millennium Falcon, all she heard was the anxious scrape of her palms rubbing against each other.

Starkiller Base was gone.

The planet the First Order had infested to build their superweapon had, ironically, become a star of its own.

And they were running back to the Resistance — victorious and not-quite-so.

Loss walked the curved halls of the ship as if it was a person. One everyone was keen on avoiding at all costs.

While Chewie held vigil over Finn and their second, more unexpected passenger, Rey sat in the pilot’s seat with her thighs held against her chest, eyes almost crossing as she stared at the blur of stars through transparisteel windows. 

Her mind scrambled to make sense of the past few hours, to take the instances of fear and shock and hope and grief and grind them between her teeth. There was a man with an outstretched hand. There was the vicious red glow of a lightsaber against falling snow. There was pain unmatched by anything she’d ever felt and a vulnerability that left her feeling more and more ill with every turn of her thoughts. 

There was a boy, injured and needing to be saved.

No.

There were two of them.

Rey grimaced and buried her mouth against one of her knees, her grip turning brutal in the still-damp fabric of her leggings.

 _Murderer_ , she provided as a word to better describe Kylo Ren than **boy**. _Monster_.

It took every remaining ounce of strength she had to pull him out of the snow when Chewie demanded that they circle back and pick him up once she and Finn had been rescued from the quickly collapsing planet. She dragged him up the boarding ramp despite Ren’s efforts, which ended up being pathetic at best, though she still struggled to understand why Chewbacca had bothered at all.

Sure, he was Han Solo and General Organa’s son, but Chewie was the reason Ren had a bolt from a bowcaster in his side.

After watching Han plummet into the belly of Starkiller Base, she didn’t know if forgiveness was possible. She slammed her eyes shut, body rocking forward against the pilot seat’s twin belts. If Chewbacca could forgive Kylo for what he did, what right did she have to hold a grudge?

The scenery shifted and changed. The Falcon became an interrogation room. Dark eyes flashed behind her eyelids, strangely hopeful.

Then, there was another hand outstretched, gloved fingers curling and rubbing at her brain as she tugged violently at the restraints. She felt her head being pulled apart and massaged in his careful hands, but even a certain amount of precision felt like dying when someone rummaged through your memories, your thoughts, your innermost and most dearly held secrets.

Nausea sought to pull her to her feet, but the harness that kept her in the pilot’s seat held her back, jostling her aching body just hard enough to pry a whimper from her throat. Her hands flew over the buckles. 

In an instant, she was standing rather than sitting before the console and its bounty of flickering buttons. All it would take was a flip of a switch and the input of a code to connect her with General Organa. There was a warning she had to share. While the idea of telling her all that had happened was suffocating, she couldn’t imagine what would happen if they showed up on D’Qar with Kylo Ren in tow without a word.

Even if he was pumped with sedatives and smeared with enough bacta to render him unconscious.

Once the Falcon was planetside, everything would change. The least she could do was contact General Organa and give her time to prepare.

The entire ship shuddered as it came down out of hyperspace. 

Had she been in her seat, Rey might have survived the stop without stumbling, but what she really needed in her life was another bruise. Apparently. Her hip slammed against the edge of the console, but quick thinking kept her from thumping her palms against anything vital when her arms shot out to brace herself. 

The only curses she knew were in Huttese and Teedospeak.

From deep inside the ship, Chewbacca gave a questioning roar.

“I’m alright!” she shouted in response, nose wrinkling as she rubbed the pads of her fingers over the would-be bruise. When he roared a second time, she couldn’t help but laugh to herself. “It’s good that you are, too!”

For a few moments, it felt as if nothing had changed. The normalcy of the interaction was what forced her back down onto the pilot’s seat, what pushed her to begin plucking at the keypad before her.

“I have to contact Leia,” she said under her breath.

But Rey stopped short of the last number. She exhaled and tipped her head back, her pointed chin jabbing upwards. What do you even begin to say? Do you apologize for watching her husband die, or do you lead with the fact that you and her Wookiee friend saved her son? Would there even be any joy in that if he was the one who put his lightsaber through his belly?

She blew out a heavy breath and winced when her injury reminded her of its existence. 

“Ow, ow…” Her forefinger jammed against the last button without a flourish. “Ow.”

At first, before the connection was made, Rey sat in the cabin with white noise as a co-pilot. The incessant rustling sound danced along her bare forearms, leaving goosebumps in its wake. She leaned forward on her seat, hands curling around the edge of the flattened cushion. The anticipation was too much. She bolted to her feet again and began to pace, cutting a quick back and forth pattern across the cramped space.

It wasn’t the general who answered. The white noise cut out all of a sudden, replaced with the muffled thumping and cries of a base in chaos. Rey could just barely make out the sounds of celebration, but even quieter were the sounds of mourning.

“This is Rey,” Rey offered, an additive of hope lilting in her voice as she leaned towards the mouthpiece. “I need to speak to General Organa.”

“The general is… busy,” said the disembodied voice — a distinguished, husky tone that she couldn’t count as familiar. ‘Busy’ meant something else, Rey was sure of it, but she couldn’t quite figure out what. “Do you have something to report?”

Rey hesitated. 

But then, realizing that Leia’s aide had nothing to gain and everything to lose from mistreating the information she had to share, the truth spilled out of Rey’s mouth without a second thought.

“The mission was a success, but we lost someone. We lost —”

“Captain Solo,” the woman murmured, her voice gone quieter for some measure of privacy. “General Leia… felt his passing, and we’ve already received a mission report from Poe Dameron.”

Rey plucked at the dry skin on her bottom lip. 

There was more, but something held her back. Something kept her from continuing. But then, another voice joined the call.

“Rey, I heard about what happened on Starkiller Base.” Hearing the general’s warm, almost smoky voice fill up the cabin loosened the tension in Rey’s muscles. Her pacing slowed, and she drifted down onto the pilot’s seat for what felt like the hundredth time in an hour. “I’m glad to hear that you’re okay.”

_Well, that's up for debate._

The words didn’t even get close to passing her lips.

What did was even more shocking.

“We have Kylo Ren.”

* * *

Katlind watched as the headset Leia had moments before held against her ear slipped from her tenuous grasp. It dangled from the console by a spiraled cord, swaying back and forth beside the general’s legs, Rey’s rambled explanation a quiet buzz from the round speakers. 

A small hand climbed up Leia’s uniform vest to grip the fabric over her chest.

The bulk of the Resistance had filtered out of the base to wait for the fighters of Black Squadron to return, as well as the Millennium Falcon. Anticipation carried them out on wings, whooping and hollering and passing around one-armed hugs. Katlind wondered what that must feel like, but instead, she remained behind in the quiet sea-green glow of maps blown up to twice or three times their usual size. There, where things were less crowded. Where she could breathe.

“We just got into the Ileenium System,” Rey continued, concern creeping into her words when no one responded to her sudden confession. “He isn’t awake, but he wasn’t injured as badly as Finn.”

Katlind picked up a sense of urgency alongside the concern, but otherwise, all she could hear was the rushing of blood in her ears.

“I will make sure Finn receives medical attention when you arrive,” she said, standing from the stool she’d been sitting on and reaching to wave down a passing cadet. Messages spread from person to person like a wildfire on a base as small as the one on D’Qar. That’s exactly what they needed — and exactly what they didn’t need. “As for… Kylo Ren.”

Her expression softened as she looked to Leia and saw the woman slowly putting herself back together again, bending to get the headset in-hand. 

Hours before, the general had splintered when she felt the galaxy shift around another senseless loss. Katlind watched that happen, as well. In some small way, Katlind had felt it, too, regardless of her few and far between meetings with the smuggler. It was her attachment to Leia that ached with grief. 

Seeing those mended pieces threaten to crumble again was heart-breaking.

“The injuries he sustained…” Katlind continued, hoping for more detail.

Leia pressed the speaker to her ear and listened as Rey gave them a rundown of everything that had happened. Chewie’s bowcaster — his side. Luke’s lightsaber — his shoulder, his chest, his face. He was unconscious and being tended to, but the retrieval of the Master of the Knights of Ren had been impulsive. They didn’t know what to do with him now that he was there.

Katlind drew herself up, pinning her shoulders back. She could not slouch and sound confident at the same time. “I will take a medic onto the Falcon once you land.” 

“Kat…” There was a distant chiding in Leia’s voice, and Katlind felt the urge to apologize when their eyes met across the command center. She swallowed it back and glanced away, hoping to avoid the woman’s critical gaze. “You know that you don’t have to.”

A hand curled around Katlind’s throat. Squeezed.

“I know,” she managed to get out, rubbing at the high neck of her blouse as if that would ease the sudden tightness there. “I want to.”

“We’ll both go,” Leia said. A smile touched the corner of her thin lips.

Katlind felt herself smile, too.

There was a long stretch of quiet on the other end before Rey spoke up. Two false starts made their way over the headset before, finally, she asked the question Katlind knew she’d be hearing a lot of in the near future. “How do you know him?”

The answer itself wasn’t difficult to find, but the memories it dredged up lingered in every shadow, linked with many more that she would have preferred to ignore. Ben Solo was a boy from another chapter in her life. He brought with him visions of Hosnian Prime and other Core Worlds, long meetings her mother took with other senators, hours and hours of lessons in etiquette and law.

Katlind stared at the orange blip that was the Millennium Falcon as it crested across the system, heading right for D’Qar. The screens usually made her eyes hurt. Still, she couldn’t help but stare.

“She grew up with him,” Leia said before Kat could formulate an answer. 

After such a long day, the connection between her head and mouth was lagging. Certain victory was comfortable. There was no victory less certain than one wrested from the hands of the First Order. No wonder.

Katlind tucked her chin down and laughed under her breath. “I grew up with him.”

There was something unimaginably strange about connecting the dots between Kylo Ren and Ben Solo. Referring to the feared Master of the Knights of Ren as someone she knew as a child rather than the distant and awkward boy who constantly forgot her name felt wrong. But they were one in the same, and that was something she had been forced to understand and accept over the past few years.

Everyone knew that Kylo Ren wore a mask. 

Few hoped beyond reason that Kylo Ren was a mask.

She was one of them.

* * *

The Millenium Falcon and Black Squadron set down on D’Qar to the sound of understandable fanfare.

No one seemed to mind the balmy heat or the blinding light of the sun. No one clung to the base’s cooling shadows. Instead, they ran out to greet the pilots who’d saved their skins. It was a familiar scene. Leia had participated in fanfare like this one no less than a dozen times in her life.

With Katlind at her side, providing a sliver of tall shadow herself, they made their way in the direction of Han’s old ship. 

The Falcon had seen better days, but it’d seen worse ones, too. She looked good for her age, just a little banged up in a few places and a little battle-scarred. That made two of them.

Nerves bubbled in her stomach, bringing up a laugh that was both anxious and sad as the boarding ramp hit the ground in a puff of dirt.

“General,” Katlind began, her fingers twitching where they were laced in front of her. She wasn’t a hand wringer. Usually, she wasn’t even a twitcher. Rey’s news had really wound her up, and Leia couldn’t begin to blame her. “What are you… expecting? From this?”

Leia exhaled and glanced skyward, her jaw jutting outward in thought. 

The day was nice. There was something hopeful about cloudless days, but she couldn’t find it within herself to tap into that hope.

What did she expect? 

If she was younger and less jaded, she might have considered the capture of her son a win. They had Ben back. As long as he was there, with her, nothing could touch him. Stupid and naive. He’d been with family every day leading up to the point where he attempted to kill one of them. But it was a good first step in the right direction, wasn’t it?

“I expect an impressive amount of blow-back,” she said. A spot of tension between her shoulders radiated outward. She ground down her molars, but fought through it to take another step in the direction of the freighter. “Widespread outrage. Assassination attempts. On him or on me, I haven’t decided.”

“Only assassination _attempts_?” Katlind asked, sounding more nonchalant than Leia had ever heard her. She knew a ruse when she heard one. “Please.”

Leia chuckled. “We’re a long way from Hapes.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, there was movement at the top of the boarding ramp. Chewbacca bent at the waist as he made his way down, careful after years of having to avoid knocking his head on the Falcon when he disembarked. His familiar Wookiee warble nearly stole the breath from her lungs. 

The pang of family was enough to knock her to her knees these days. Somewhere along the line, she’d let herself become a sentimental old woman.

Sometimes.

Chewbacca rushed the rest of the way down the ramp and pulled Leia into his arms. His fur tickled her nose, as always, but the relief she felt in being held by a friend was more powerful than any itch. 

“Chewie,” she sighed, fingers curling against his coat. “Glad you made it back.”

He rumbled a few notes she couldn’t quite catch. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Katlind smile and incline her head.

“It’s good to see you, too.” 

Leia took the moment of relative quiet to bury her face into Chewbacca’s stomach before stepping back with a tired smile of her own. Behind her, she heard the pounding of footsteps on the ground. A glance was all she needed to realize they belonged to both the medics and the curious. “Where is Finn?”

A stretcher pulled around to the top of the boarding ramp, hovering above the ground with the aid of miniature repulsorlifts, and on the stretcher was Finn, laying on his stomach, stripped to the waist and covered in thick bacta patches.

Behind him, Rey stood in all of her anxiety, dark eyes flicking between her friend and everyone there to greet or to help him.

“General Organa!”

Leia’s head swiveled in the direction of the voice only to find Poe Dameron at the very end of a full-tilt run in her direction. Hair in his face, the smile on his mouth slowly fading as the details of the scene all fell into place. His attention shifted from her to the boarding ramp to the stretcher to the fallen Stormtrooper and Rey.

“Oh, no,” he exhaled in a rough puff of a sigh. “Is he alright?”

Leia clapped a hand on Poe’s shoulder. “He’ll be better when we get him into the base and start looking after him.”

“Right.” Poe scrambled back a few steps and allowed the medics through. Both he and Rey wore the same expression on their faces. The same weight pushed at their shoulders. Seeing the excitement of victory broken apart by the reality of war left Leia favoring old wounds. “Kylo Ren?”

Leia could feel him.

Inside of the ship, her son’s heart pulsed like a planet’s core. She reached out to him, but stopped just short of contact, fearing the reaction she would get. “Kylo Ren,” she murmured. She opened her mouth to explain further only to be quieted by Katlind moving around into her field of view, her eyes flashing with concern. There was nothing else to say to Poe, not yet. 

The confessions would follow much later, once she saw her son for the first time since everything had changed.

Both Rey and Poe joined each other and the medics around the stretcher, disappearing into the jubilant crowd without another word. That was all the explanation Poe thought he needed. Good.

Chewie rested his heavy hand on Leia’s shoulder before shifting it around to her back. His roar was a quiet one that ended in a broken whine.

“We’ll see him now,” Leia said. “It’ll just be us three. Then, a medic. One we know we can trust.”

It was a hell of a secret to keep.

Not that they would be keeping it for very long.

Taking that first step onto the loading ramp of the Falcon felt like falling, like she’d been picked up and thrown back decades. Everything was a little yellower, a little worse for wear, but there was nothing she didn’t recognize. Every seat, every buckle, every button — she knew what they felt like, how they worked, what they did. 

It took twenty-eight steps to get to the back of the ship. Seven more than in the beginning, but that wasn’t too bad. 

The air was the same. A little musty, a lot recycled. One breath even smelled faintly like Han’s old cologne. 

That one wasn’t the easiest to take.

With Chewbacca and Katlind at her back, Leia made her way through the curved hallways of the Millennium Falcon, knowing that there would be an end. The hall would open up into a room littered with memories. Her son would be there.

Chewie’s presence was comforting, but Katlind’s roiling apprehension left Leia feeling on edge.

The Force was a curse just as often as it was a blessing. 

Leia pushed a slow exhale out through her teeth as she rounded the last corner. So many times, Luke had attempted to convince her that that wasn’t the truth at all. The Force was everything, not just good and bad. It was in every sigh and every cell. It was in the mediocre. But Leia enjoyed her dramatics. It was part of being a former senator.

The first thing Leia noticed upon entering the Falcon’s charmingly ramshackle medbay was the scent of fruit.

Bacta patches were less intrusive than tanks of the stuff, but there was still something sickly hanging in the air as they gathered beneath the yellow-tinted globe of light at the center of the room.

There were two beds. One had been recently vacated, while the other was occupied by a bare-chested figure, half-turned onto his uninjured side with his sweat-soaked hair curling long and loose over the pillow beneath his head. A massive bacta patch covered him from his hip to the bottom of his ribs — the bowcaster injury — while other, smaller ones were scattered over his pale, bruising skin. 

Leia wavered on her feet.

It was Katlind, not Chewie, who reached out and grasped her arm to steady her. The young woman flinched away from her own actions, but refused to pull away until she was sure that Leia was stable.

“Thank you,” she said over her shoulder, her voice unnecessarily quiet.

Ben was still unconscious. 

That amount of bacta didn’t leave anyone awake and ready for a fight, not even someone with Han Solo’s revulsion to losing. 

“It’s him,” Leia found herself saying. She pressed her fingertips to her lips and whispered against them, her heart hammering in her chest and in her head. Not even she, with all of her practiced platitudes and decades of experience, knew what else to say. To herself, to Chewie, to Katlind, to her son. “Thank you for bringing one of them back, Chewie.”

The Wookiee made a hushed, mournful sound at the back of his throat.

Leia felt every word. 

“This is just the beginning,” she said, drifting back to rest her hip against the bolted down table in the middle of the room. “I’m not sure where we go from here. I never thought I’d see him again.”

Chewbacca began moving around the room, organizing medical tools that had been upturned during their escape, doing everything he could to not be expected to have a response. Katlind didn’t have that excuse. She stood there, silent as a crypt, her unwavering stare turned on Ben. 

And then, she spoke.

“We can’t fail this time,” Katlind murmured without looking away from him. “Snoke will be counting on us not being able to give him a reason to stay.”

A reason to stay. 

It was a simple way to describe a much larger issue, one Leia wracked her brain over every night since she received the news about Luke’s Jedi temple. What had she done to push him away? What didn’t she do? Could a mother’s love be stronger than the seductive power of the Dark Side? She’d given it to him, hadn’t she?

“I guess we’ll see.” 

Leia moved slowly across the floor. Hesitation kept her footsteps heavy, guiding her towards Ben and the steady pulse of his heartbeat that stood in such sharp relief against the jagged edges she felt in his…

What was she supposed to call it? That thing she felt, pressing against her skin as she got closer and closer to him?

She gave her head a shake. Luke had been a good brother, but only an… okay Master.

Instead of hemming and hawing over her patchy understanding of the Force, Leia found a place on the bed to sit beside her son. His skin was clammy to the touch and searingly hot. That was the bacta at work, she reassured herself, mending his wounds and repairing most of what had been damaged.

“We’ll give you a reason to stick with us,” Leia whispered, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her.

Or, at least, she was under the impression that he couldn’t.

There was so much that she didn’t fully comprehend.


End file.
